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Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, also known as Mahatma Gandhi, Bapu and Gandhiji, was the preeminent leader of the Indian independence movement in British-ruled India. Employing nonviolent civil disobedience, he led India to independence and inspired movements for civil rights and freedom across the world.

Born on October 2, 1869, in a Hindu merchant caste family in coastal Gujarat, he first employed nonviolent civil disobedience as an expatriate lawyer in South Africa, in the resident Indian community's struggle for civil rights. After his return to India in 1915, he set about organising peasants, farmers, and urban labourers to protest against excessive land-tax and discrimination. Assuming leadership of the Indian National Congress in 1921, Gandhi led nationwide campaigns for easing poverty, expanding women's rights, building religious and ethnic amity, ending untouchability, but above all for achieving Swaraj or self-rule.

Gandhi famously led Indians in challenging the British-imposed salt tax with the 400km Dandi Salt March in 1930, and later in calling for the British to Quit India in 1942. He was imprisoned for many years, upon many occasions, in both South Africa and India. He lived modestly in a self-sufficient residential community and wore the traditional Indian dhoti and shawl, woven with yarn hand-spun on a charkha. He ate simple vegetarian food, and also undertook long fasts as a means of both self-purification and social protest.

On 30 January 1948, Nathuram Godse, a Hindu nationalist with links to the extremist Hindu Mahasabha, fired three bullets from a Beretta 9mm pistol into Gandhi's chest at point-blank range. Godse and his co-conspirator were tried and executed in 1949.

Mahatma Gandhi's birthday, 2 October, is commemorated as Gandhi Jayanti, a national holiday, and worldwide as the International Day of Nonviolence.